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Jennifer Abruzzo Asks NLRB Board to Ban “Captive Audience” Meetings in Workplace

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2022 //
10

Harold Meyerson writes here about Jennifer Abruzzo’s request to the National Labor Relations Board to ban “captive audience” meetings, in which employers lecture their employees about the dangers of joining a union. Abruzzo is the recently appointed general counsel of the agency, where she has worked for many years. She is in a hurry to restore the original purpose of the NLRB, which was to create a level field for employers and employees.

Meyerson writes in The American Prospect:

By now, it’s clear that Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, is both an originalist and an adherent to the belief that the National Labor Relations Act is a law whose interpretations must have some relation to current realities.

One of those realities is that a succession of Board and court rulings over many decades has eroded the act itself, and with it, the very worker rights the act was written to ensure. One of those erosions is the “captive audience” meeting, which employees are compelled to attend, at which their managers subject them to arguments against their going union. The very fact that attendance is compulsory underscores the imbalance of power between boss and worker, such that the meetings constitute an implicit—and sometimes explicit—threat to the workers. The authors of the NLRA meant to give workers the right to freely choose whether to unionize. Compelling workers to attend these meetings (and forbidding union advocates from holding even voluntary meetings at the worksite), Abruzzo argues, erodes that right of free choice.

In a memo she sent to NLRB staff today, Abruzzo announced she would ask the Board to ban such captive audience meetings for violating both the letter and spirit of the NLRA. The act, she wrote, “protects employees’ right to listen as well as their right to refrain from listening to employer speech concerning the exercise of their Section 7 rights”—that is, their rights to freely choose whether or not to unionize and to have a voice on the job. “Forcing employees to listen to such employer speech under threat of discipline—directly leveraging the employees’ dependence on their jobs—plainly chills employees’ protected right to refrain from listening to this speech,” she asserted.

Today’s memo is of a piece with Abruzzo’s previous memos, all of which seek to restore the NLRA to what its authors intended: an act enabling workers to freely choose whether to organize and, if they do so choose, to bargain collectively. As I’ve reported in my profile of Abruzzo, which appears in our April print issue, she has emerged as the most potent champion of worker rights that the government has seen in a great many years, and as such, by happy coincidence, as the most potent ally of the generation of workers we’ve seen unionizing on campuses, at Starbucks, and now, at an Amazon warehouse.

Abruzzo writes lots of these potentially very impactful memos. I’ll try to keep you posted on them as she turns them out.

Categories Economy, Equity, Unions

Jennifer Abruzzo: Can She Save the Labor Movement?

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2022 //
9

There was a time—more than half a century ago—when labor unions promised to guarantee fair wages, decent working hours, and secure benefits for American workers. Unions raised many people from poverty to the middle class. Yet today, unions—especially in the private sector—are at a low point, due to anti-union activities by corporate America. But recent organizing efforts at two of the nation’s largest employers—Amazon and Starbucks—show promise of change.

One woman is in a position to protect the rights of workers to join a union: Jennifer Abruzzo. The American Prospect has written about her, and I am sharing some of those articles here.

Harold Meyerson wrote:

One gap between American public opinion and American public policy has been growing steadily wider over the past dozen years. Public support for unions rose to a high point of 68 percent last year, while the actual rate of membership in unions, continuing its 70-year descent, hit a new low last year of a bare 6 percent of private-sector employees.

In democracies, the common response to realities so at odds with public sentiment is something like “there ought to be a law.”

In this case, there is. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), enacted in 1935, gave workers a legal right to form unions and bargain collectively. For a decade, it worked as intended, as a previously moribund union movement grew to encompass fully one-third of the nation’s workforce. For the next decade, despite a Republican Congress limiting the law’s scope with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, unions held their own. Thereafter, membership percentages began a slow but relentless decline, as court decisions and the ferocious opposition of American business to worker rights turned the NLRA on its head. Though the Act remained on the books, the penalties employers faced for violating its terms—by intimidating or even firing workers seeking to unionize—were so minimal that employer lawbreaking became common practice and successful unionization campaigns became rarer and rarer.

Eventually, Democrats became aware that the weakness of federal labor law not only triggered deunionization and hollowed out the middle class, but also reduced workers’ support for the Democratic Party. But Republicans are implacably opposed to unions, and a critical mass of Democrats are implacably opposed to abolishing the filibuster and restoring majority rule in the Senate. So while you can write a bill like the PRO Act, which would patch many of the holes in the NLRA, you can’t get it passed, and consequently, you can’t reverse labor’s decline.

Or can you?

Last summer, on a party-line vote, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees union recognition contests and investigates and adjudicates disputes over violations of the NLRA. While not a member of the Board itself (which by custom consists of three appointees from the president’s party and two from the opposition’s), the general counsel functions as the NLRB’s chief prosecutor, directing its roughly 500 attorneys across the nation on what kind of cases to bring and what remedies to seek. It’s a powerful position, but no previous general counsel had used that power quite like Abruzzo has.

Just two weeks after she was confirmed in late July, Abruzzo sent out her first memo to staff attorneys, a common practice for new general counsels, laying out the kind of cases attorneys should file. Her stated intention was to reverse the Trump-appointee-dominated Board’s anti-worker rulings that, she wrote, had “overruled legal precedent.” But she added that she also wanted to pursue other cases “not necessarily the subject of a more recent Board decision, [that] are nevertheless ones I would like to carefully examine,” because they, too, ran counter to the NLRA. For example, in cases where employers refused to recognize a union even though a majority of workers had indicated through signing affiliation cards that they wished to form one, she advised the Board attorneys to consult the Joy Silk Mills case for the appropriate remedy.

“Even labor lawyers had forgotten about Joy Silk,” says Catherine Fisk, a professor of labor law at the University of California, Berkeley. And no wonder: The Joy Silk ruling, which was promulgated in 1949 by a Board dominated by Harry Truman’s appointees, was substantially overturned in 1969 in a Supreme Court case known as Gissel, and the NLRB, dominated by Richard Nixon’s appointees at the time, wasn’t inclined to defend the Truman Board’s remedies.

Under Joy Silk, employers who refused to recognize a union’s legitimate majority status had been compelled to recognize the union and to enter into bargaining with it, except in rare instances. Under Gissel, employers who refused to recognize a union’s legitimate majority status were compelled merely to run or rerun an election among their employees to determine union status, except in rare instances. That enabled employers to delay recognition and bargaining, in some cases for years, and to intimidate workers from voting in a union in a much-delayed election.

The abandonment of Joy Silk made a huge difference in employer behavior. As a 2017 article in the Santa Clara Law Review documented, eliminating Joy Silk’s standard for the remedy when employers refused to recognize their workers’ pro-union preference led to an immediate increase in employer violations of the NLRA’s letter and spirit. In the five years before Joy Silk was struck down, charges of employer intimidation totaled about 1,000 cases a year. Once the softball remedies of Gissel became the standard, charges exploded to a peak of 6,493 in 1981, after which they fell along with unionization efforts generally. Under Gissel, intimidation became the norm.

Abruzzo believed it would take going back to Joy Silk to make workers’ right to form unions—a right ensured by the NLRA—real again. Many employers, Abruzzo told me, are “abusing [the law’s] processes in order to coerce employees to change their minds and vote against the union, where it obviously enjoys majority support.” When Joy Silk was the standard, “there were many more elections that were untainted” by employer intimidation. And if the company, under a revived Joy Silk, enters into a bargaining process that it prolongs by stalling and refusing to reach an agreement, Abruzzo further believes the NLRB should compel it to compensate workers for what they would have made under a promptly negotiated contract, “if the employer had bargained in good faith from the start.”

Nothing in the PRO Act, or any labor law proposal over the past few decades, even touches on reviving Joy Silk. As one union official puts it, “we have a general counsel that’s pushing the envelope beyond what unions themselves have been pushing for.”

THE JOY SILK MEMO was just the beginning for Abruzzo. In short order, a flurry of other memos followed.

She called for increasing employers’ “back pay” payments to employees that they’ve illegally fired to include payments for the financial sacrifices the employees made due to the firing, such as withdrawals from 401(k)s or taking out loans. Her new standards also required employers to compensate unions for the expenses they incurred in fighting their employer’s illegal behavior. She proposed treating employers’ “captive audience” meetings, in which workers are invariably compelled to hear management’s case against unionizing, as an unfair labor practice, for which an appropriate remedy would be allowing the union to hold meetings with workers at their worksite as well. She recommended that costs to workers and unions be paid in full in any settlement agreements, while eliminating any “non-admission of guilt” language from such settlements to establish a pattern of violations if such were to exist. She recognized student athletes in lucrative college sports as employees under the NLRA. She ensured rights, protections, and remedies for immigrant workers under the NLRA.

And she instructed attorneys to hasten remedies under the NLRA’s 10(j) section by more frequently seeking cease-and-desist injunctions against offending employers. Abruzzo encouraged filing these injunctions not only when a worker in an organizing drive was illegally fired, but when an employer threatened to fire such workers, or to shut down the worksite if the workers go union. Both of those actions are also illegal under the NLRA. Abruzzo’s goal is to make sure that efforts to unlawfully thwart employees’ rights to form a union can “be nipped in the bud” while the organizing drive is still proceeding.

The Biden administration is clearly the most pro-union administration in American history, with its backing of the PRO Act, its recommendations for greater worker rights in the federal government, its extension of higher wage standards on federally funded projects, its preference for unionized companies in its domestic production bill, its groundbreaking demand for a fair union affiliation vote in a Mexican factory under the terms of the revised NAFTA, and the president’s own pro-worker message to the employees at Amazon’s Alabama warehouse. Even without Abruzzo’s efforts, this would be a significant step forward in the posture of a presidency toward the labor movement.

But few observers would dispute the assessment of Celine McNicholas, a former NLRB special counsel who is now the general counsel and director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, who tells me, “Installing Jennifer Abruzzo as the NLRB’s general counsel will be the most impactful action that the Biden administration took in its first term for working people.”

JENNIFER ABRUZZO HAS SPENT 23 of her 58 years as an attorney at the NLRB, starting out as a field attorney in the Miami office, rising to the position of deputy attorney for the Florida region, then moving at the Board’s request to its Washington, D.C., headquarters, where she rose to be deputy general counsel during the Obama administration. During the Trump years, she rotated out of government to the Communications Workers of America (CWA), where she served as special counsel until the Senate confirmed her nomination last summer.

Abruzzo grew up in a working-class family in the (then as now) working-class neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. Her father was an electrical engineer at ConEd; her mother was an X-ray technician at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Both were union members. Jennifer, her parents, and her siblings (she’s the eldest of four) lived in a three-room apartment. “Not three bedrooms,” she clarified. “Three rooms. But I had a roof over my head and food on the table, and having those union benefits definitely helped us.”

She attended parochial schools, then went to college at New York state colleges: SUNY Binghamton and SUNY Stony Brook. An early marriage brought her to Miami, where she had her son, divorced, and went to work in the human resources department of a South American–oriented branch of Deutsche Bank.

“I was divorced with a young child and needed to support us both,” she said, “so I ended up going to law school, the University of Miami Law School, at night,” while working at the bank during the day. No labor law classes were available at night, but Abruzzo took an evidence class with Michael Fischl, a former NLRB attorney who taught labor law in the daytime.

Fischl, now a law professor at the University of Connecticut, recalls that he taught that evidence class “with a heavy labor and employment law emphasis.” In a class of roughly 100 students, he says, Abruzzo “stood out for her thoughtfulness and the depth of her engagement,” so much so that she was invited to join a social justice and legal theory book group with other faculty members and students.

“It’s hard enough to work and go to law school at the same time,” Fischl says. “Add to that being a single mom. I’m reminded of that line about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.”

When an attorney’s position came open in the NLRB’s Miami office, Fischl recommended Abruzzo for the job, though she’d had just a year in private practice. At the NLRB, she spent a good deal of her time representing immigrants from both Central and South America, as well as Haiti.

“What drew me to the NLRB?” Abruzzo says. “Coming from a union household helped, but what that instilled in me was a very strong work ethic, and also being empathetic towards others who might not have as much as we did … I just wanted to ensure that I did everything I could to ensure that people were treated equitably.”

“I WOULD DESCRIBE JENNIFER as the master mechanic of the NLRB,” says Jody Calemine, the general counsel and chief of staff at CWA. “She’s worked there at every level, she knows what works, what doesn’t work. She has encyclopedic knowledge of the case law, knows all the arguments inside and out, and she truly believes in the Act.”

When McNicholas worked as an NLRB special counsel while Abruzzo was deputy general counsel during Obama’s presidency, “she helped me figure out how the agency worked,” McNicholas says. “All the regional offices are overseen by general counsel’s division of operations. She brought a field perspective to the job.”

Abruzzo’s attentiveness to the concerns of the Board’s far-flung staff is already the stuff of legend. Her zeal to make the NLRA work again has won her a particular following among the many young attorneys who work there.

“I’ve seen her with her young attorneys,” says Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney in private practice who represents unions and workers who are misclassified by their employers as independent contractors rather than employees. “They see this general counsel who is brilliant, who believes in the Act, who articulates their beliefs so eloquently and who works so hard.”

One of those young attorneys is Aaron Samsel, who works in the Board’s Washington headquarters. After going to work for the Board right out of law school, he left during the Trump presidency, but when Biden nominated Abruzzo for the general counsel’s post, he decided to go back. “Among all my colleagues, both staff attorneys and supervisory attorneys, there’s this feeling of profound relief to have a general counsel who they feel has their back,” Samsel says. “She really listens when people bring concerns to her, and she understands it all. She can get into the minutiae of handling a case.”

That understanding of how workers and employers actually interact in an organizing campaign underpins many of Abruzzo’s directions to her staff. Her directive on filing 10(j) injunctions against employers threatening their workers during organizing campaigns is based on her knowledge that the long-established practice of winning back-pay settlements for illegally fired workers years after they’ve been fired does nothing to stop such conduct when it’s being used to thwart a unionization campaign. “10(j) injunctions are the teeth of the Act,” says Gutman Dickinson, who under its terms has won a number of such cease-and-desist orders and orders to reinstate fired workers, “and Jennifer completely understands that.”

The understanding of how workers and employers actually interact in an organizing campaign underpins many of Abruzzo’s directions to staff.

Abruzzo’s memos take aim not just at the timing but also at the insufficiency of the penalties the NLRB has commonly assessed against employers—chiefly, offering back pay to illegally fired workers and posting a notice somewhere in the worksite that the employer has been found in violation of the NLRA and made such a payment. Abruzzo points out that the Act doesn’t allow for punitive damages, so that truly enforcing it requires that fired workers be made financially whole. That means making the employer cover all loans, credit card fees, and withdrawals from savings and retirement funds that the worker has been compelled to make.

The NLRB should be looking, Abruzzo told me, at “how can we put people back to the way it was before all this unlawful activity occurred, at whether there’s been emotional distress that can be particularly linked to an unlawful discharge, in much the way our sister agencies [like, for instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] seek such compensation.”

Harvard labor law professor Ben Sachs explains, “For decades, the lament of labor lawyers and organizers has been that the NLRA remedies are like a bad joke, so weak that it’s economically rational for employers to violate the law. Now, she’s done something that really wasn’t in the collective legal imagination: figured out how to increase remedies without congressional action. She’s found a number of ways to do exactly that.”

“Making employers who’ve broken the law pay the union back for its organizing expenses could be of major importance,” Sachs says. “She’s been imaginative in an arena where many of us were just lamenting.”

Another remedy that wasn’t in the collective legal imagination is Abruzzo’s proposal to declare captive audience meetings an unfair labor practice, the remedy for which should be enabling unions to hold their own meetings with workers, at the worksite. She also has called for making employers provide unions with the home addresses of workers during organizing campaigns, a remedy that’s particularly important at a time when an unprecedented number of employees are working from home.

In her memos, Abruzzo has said Board attorneys should file cases based on the argument that the misclassification of workers as independent contractors when they are actually employees is in itself an unfair labor practice under the NLRA, for which the Board can provide a remedy that states the workers are employees and thus eligible to unionize. The Trump-dominated Board had ruled that such misclassifications were not an unfair labor practice. That’s one of the Trump rulings, Abruzzo has stated, that violates the NLRA and should be overturned. And on March 17th, following Abruzzo’s memos, NLRB attorneys filed a complaint against a port trucking company at the Los Angeles harbor for the unfair labor practice of misclassifying its drivers, which, if upheld by an administrative law judge, would compel the firm to compensate them for lost wages and expenses and to provide a union with access to the drivers in an organizing campaign.

Misclassification is at the heart of the gig economy and, increasingly, the economy at large. Depending on the “common sense” standard of whether, say, a driver of a company’s trucks is an employee or a contractor, such a ruling could affect such mega-companies as FedEx, Amazon, Uber, and Lyft, not to mention countless smaller employers.

Abruzzo is taking on worker misclassification, a critical issue for port truckers.

As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein points out, due to the need to win support from Southern senators, the NLRA initially excluded farm and domestic workers (that is, Black workers) from the law’s guarantees. As a result of the civil rights and kindred movements, some New Deal measures, like the minimum wage, were finally extended to some of those workers in recent decades. This triggered a new tactic from employers, Lichtenstein says. “The guarantees of labor law have been chipped away to exempt other people: managers, and now ‘independent contractors.’ That exempts more and more people from New Deal standards and rights. It’s been a Republican project.”

Making misclassification a violation of the NLRA would go a long way, then, to revive not just the NLRA, but an entire suite of legal obligations—like the minimum wage and payments into the Social Security and unemployment insurance systems—that companies now evade by refusing to acknowledge their workers actually work for them.

BOTH THE QUALITY AND the quantity of Abruzzo’s directives have dazzled the labor and legal communities, while alarming management-side attorneys. At a recent American Bar Association meeting that Abruzzo addressed, one corporate lawyer was overheard remarking, “We may have to find a different country.”

Abruzzo’s suggested reforms certainly mark a departure from previous practices under Democratic as well as Republican administrations. In the assessment of one longtime union official, “the Board under Bill Clinton viewed the Act largely as they received it, accepting as precedents the interpretations that had watered it down. The Board under Obama sought to update the law to meet new developments in the economy, as they did in their joint employer ruling saying that the parent company shared in the liability of its franchisers if they violated the Act, a ruling that the courts subsequently struck down. With Abruzzo under Biden, the agenda is now to get rid of all the erosions of the Act that have essentially ended the worker rights the Act created and secured.”

NLRB veterans generally believe the Democratic majority on the current Board will establish rulings that are based on Abruzzo’s arguments. “The majority will likely be sympathetic to all her proposals,” says Wilma Liebman, who chaired the Board during Obama’s presidency. Liebman is concerned, however, that the Board may be stretched by the sheer number of precedent-challenging cases that Abruzzo brings before it.

Some labor attorneys are concerned for a different reason: that Abruzzo’s agenda is both too ambitious and too well publicized. “I’m surprised at how public she’s been about it all, putting out her theories step by step,” says one. “Does the publicity heighten the possibility that rulings will be challenged more quickly in the courts? She may be giving employers an unnecessary head start.”

The courts, after all, can overturn NLRB rulings, and no court since the 1920s has been as anti-labor as the Supreme Court is today. Every attorney and union official I’ve spoken with for this piece has been gloomy about the prospects of some of Abruzzo’s policies passing muster with such avowed union-haters as the Supreme Court’s Sam Alito and his five Republican colleagues. They point out, however, that it normally takes many years for NLRB rulings to reach the Supreme Court (“They’re too busy right now outlawing abortion,” one lawyer said), and that during that interval, Abruzzo’s suggested policies can make it significantly easier for workers to prevail, particularly the generation of young workers at universities and Starbucks and tech companies, who in growing numbers are moving to win a voice at work. A case in point: Shortly after she sent out her memo calling captive audience meetings an unfair labor practice, the union seeking to organize Amazon’s warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, put out a press release alleging just such violations, quoting her memo to bolster their case.

That may be one more reason, in addition to her determination to restore the worker rights encoded in the NLRA, and her general sense of justice, why Abruzzo looks to be in such a blessed hurry.

Categories Economy, Unions

Ron DeSantis’ Abuse of Government Power to Impose His Hatreds Is Dangerous

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2022 //
37

Yesterday, the Florida Legislature passed legislation enacting Governor DeSantis’ personal vendetta against the Disney corporation, dissolving the special district status it enjoys, where it supplies all its own services, such as security and sanitation. Disney is a huge economic boon to the state, drawing millions of tourists to Florida every year. DeSantis wanted to punish Disney for criticizing his anti-gay law. Some pundits think this will backfire because it is likely to raise taxes in the counties that will have to pay for those services.

But Greg Sergeant of the Washington Post says that DeSantis’s retaliation against Disney is very dangerous for democracy. This is the behavior of a banana republic thug. Will he next punish corporations that encourage diversity, inclusion, and equity, another of his obsessions?

He writes that DeSantis’ thuggishness is admired by other Republicans, and that’s ominous:

What’s at issue is the use of such a policy as retaliation against Disney for taking a stand on DeSantis’s law. The measure bars or restricts instruction on sexual orientation and gender orientation in a way that’s plainly designed to chill even the most routine discussion of LGBTQ topics.
Disney opposes the law on the grounds that “it could be used to unfairly target” LGBTQ kids and families. And this is an absolutely understandable fear.

But here again, the law’s specifics are beside the point. You don’t have to back Disney’s stance to agree that the company should not be punished with a change in government policy for expressing its opinion of the law.

So what does this tell us about a possible GOP future? Well, on multiple fronts, the Republican Party is growing much more inclined to use state power to fight the culture wars, well beyond just DeSantis.

In an interview published this week, J.D. Vance told Vanity Fair that he envisions a kind of “de-Baathification” or a “de-woke-ification” of the “institutions of the left.”

Vance, who’s running for Senate in Ohio in the New Right nationalist vein, said that if Donald Trump is elected president, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat” and “every civil servant in the administrative state,” and “replace them with our people.”

It’s worth taking this seriously. Other members of that New Right movement recently told me they envision a ramped-up use of the state to impose a post-liberal moral order, justified by hyperbolic visions of the supposedly hegemonic power of the left over our institutions.

Meanwhile, GOP elected officials seem to be moving this way. Congressional Republicans have vowed retaliation against companies for opposing Georgia’s voter suppression bill and for cooperating with the congressional investigation into Trump’s coup attempt.

And DeSantis is a front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Importantly, he’s flaunting his willingness to use state power this way as a selling point for the presidency.

So let’s run a thought experiment. What might it look like if a President DeSantis took this view of the administrative state and decided to wield his power this way?

Donald Moynihan, an expert on the administrative state at Georgetown, says you can envision various scenarios. Such a president, he said, might use regulatory agencies staffed with right-thinking political employees (which Vance explicitly wants) to harass or investigate companies perceived as “culturally disloyal.”

Another possibility, Moynihan said, might be to change the tax status of liberal-leaning foundations. Those are already another favorite target of right-wing populists.

Faced with a president “who’s fully willing to use the powers of the administrative state,” Moynihan told me, such foundations might refrain from advocating for various causes or fund certain types of research, “because it’s not worth the potential risks.”

What if such a president were backed in this project by congressional leadership? Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor who studies Congress, says you could see legislation targeted at offending companies, and even if it didn’t survive the courts, it could still function in a punitive way.

Those companies would sink large sums of money into litigating against such measures, even as Congress relied on taxpayer-funded lawyers on their side, Chafetz told me, meaning “the onus of the expense would fall on the companies, which would have a chilling effect.”

So a lot is at stake in how DeSantis’s war with Disney turns out. To glimpse the future, just look at what DeSantis is saying and doing right now. And given all the accolades he’s getting from the right, does anyone doubt that this could get a whole lot worse?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Economy, Florida

Rick Scott’s Radical Far-Right Agenda to Roll Back the Clock

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2022 //
62

Florida Senator Rick Scott released his 11-point plan for the future. It contains every “culture war” issue that gets Republicans riled up. Abortion, gays, race, gender, patriotism.

It contains not a single proposal to address climate change, the economy, jobs, healthcare, or any other idea to address real problems of real people.

Rick Scott’s agenda:

  1. Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them. We will inspire patriotism and stop teaching the revisionist history of the radical left; our kids will learn about the wisdom of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the founding fathers. Public schools will focus on the 3 R’s, not indoctrinate children with critical race theory or any other political ideology. 
  2. Government will never again ask American citizens to disclose their race, ethnicity, or skin color on any government forms. We are going to eliminate racial politics in America. No government policy will be based on race. People “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We are all made in the image of God; to judge a person on the color of their epidermis is immoral.
  3. The soft-on-crime days of coddling criminal behavior will end. We will re-fund and respect the police because they, not the criminals, are the good guys. We will enforce our laws, all of them, and increase penalties for theft and violent crime. We will clean up our cities and stop pretending that crime is OK. We have zero-tolerance for “mostly peaceful protests” that attack police officers, loot businesses, and burn down our cities. 
  4. We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump. Nations have borders. We should give that a try. President Trump’s plan to build a wall was right. We welcome those who want to join us in building the American dream, immigrants who want to be Americans, not change America. We are a stronger nation because we are a nation of immigrants; but immigration without assimilation makes us weaker. Politicians from both parties talk big about border security and do nothing. We are done with that.
  5. We will grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism. Socialism is un-American and always leads to poverty and oppression. We will stop it. We will shrink the federal government, reduce the government work force by 25% in 5 years, sell government buildings and assets, and get rid of the old, slow, closed, top-down, government-run-everything system we have today
  6. We will eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress. Many government agencies should be either moved out of Washington or shuttered entirely. Yesterday’s old government is fundamentally incompatible with the digital era. The permanent ruling class in Washington is bankrupting us with inflation and debt, so they must be removed. For you to have more, Washington must have less.
  7. We will protect the integrity of American Democracy and stop left-wing efforts to rig elections. Today’s Democrat Party is trying to rig elections and pack the courts because they have given up on Democracy. They don’t believe they can win based on their ideas, so they want to game the system and legalize voter fraud to stay in power. In true Orwellian fashion, Democrats refer to their election rigging plans as “voting rights”. We won’t allow the radical left to destroy our democracy by institutionalizing dishonesty and fraud.
  8. We will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs. The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family. 
  9. Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science: Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them.’ Modern technology has confirmed that abortion takes a human life. Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.
  10. Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of our lives, and we will stop all government efforts to deny our religious freedom and freedom of speech. The Democrat Party and their Big Tech allies are not merely secular; they have virtually created a new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews. They are determined to drive all mention of God out of public view. We will not be silenced, canceled, or told what words to use by the politically correct crowd. 
  11. We are Americans, not globalists. America will be dependent on NO other country. We will conduct no trade that takes away jobs or displaces American workers. Countries who oppose us at the UN will get zero financial help from us. We will be energy independent and build supply chains that never rely on our adversaries. We will only help countries that are willing to defend themselves, like Israel.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Economy, Elections, Environment, Florida, Republicans, Vouchers

Washington Post: Russian Invasion Would Disrupt Global Economy

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2022 //
121

Anthony Faiola writes in the Washington Post that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would cause global disruption of food and fuel supplies.

More than 100,000 Russian troops are massed near Ukraine amid a flurry of diplomatic efforts to defuse the prospect of conflict. Should peace not prevail, western-gazing Ukrainians would pay the highest price. But in a worst-case scenario, the cost of a major Russian invasion of Ukraine — one of the world’s largest grain exporters — could ripple across the globe, driving up already surging food prices and increasing the risk of social unrest well beyond Eastern Europe.

As tensions mount, one focus of economic concern is the global impact of extreme Western sanctions on Russia — a major exporter of agricultural goods, metals and fuel, particularly to Western Europe and China. Should the crisis escalate to the point of triggering staggering sanctions, the blow could spike prices and worsen global supply chain woes by tightening markets for commodities including natural gas and metals such as nickel, copper and platinum used in the manufacturing of everything from cars to spacecrafts.

Yet perhaps just as crucially, a major Russian incursion would also affect the flow of goods from Ukraine, the world’s fourth-largest supplier of wheat and corn. A major disruption of Ukrainian exports — especially in conjunction with any interruption in even larger Russian grain exports — could pile onto a global inflationary cycle that in many countries is already the worst in decades.

Concern is especially focused on fuel and food. Last year, global food prices surged 28.1 percent to their highest level in a decade, according to the United Nation’s food agency. Worries of war have already driven U.S. corn futures to their highest levels since June and sent wheat futures to two-month highs before a recent easing.

Over the past 20 years, bountiful Ukrainian harvests boosted the country’s role as a global breadbasket. Some of its biggest clients are economically battered, war-torn or otherwise fragile states in the Middle East and Africa, including Yemen, Lebanon and Libya, where grain shortages or cost surges could not only deepen misery but churn up unpredictable social consequences.

The world waits to see what Putin wants and commands.

Categories Economy

Robert Kuttner: Look Up!

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2022 //
39

Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect reviews the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up!


“Appreciate the brilliance of the season’s most profound, category-busting movie.”

Don’t Look Up is described as a parody of Trumpism and climate denial. It is elegantly that. But more importantly, the movie is a dead-on satire of the interconnected debasement of America’s politics, pop culture, conventional media, social media, spectacle, tech and corporate elite—and of how the corruption of each element corrupts the other, feeding the general cynicism and the craving for a fascist savior, political or corporate.

Credit goes to the director, writers, and producers: Adam McKay, David Sirota, Kevin Messick, and Ron Suskind. The public seems to grasp what this movie is about more than many critics.

Don’t Look Up is the top Netflix hit, so no spoiler alert is needed: A graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers that a comet is headed directly for Earth, where it will wipe out human life. She and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) meet with the president (Meryl Streep), who is torn between denial and acting decisively to save the planet (Trump and vaccines?).

The president has a demented chief-of-staff son (the Trump kids). I am told that the opportunistic Streep character was intended as three parts Trump and one part the Clintons.

The president, after dithering, initially orders NASA to send a nuclear weapon to explode in space and deflect the comet. But here comes the best part of the movie.

A tech billionaire, played by Mark Rylance, realizes that the comet contains trillions of dollars’ worth of rare minerals. So he devises a rival mission, blessed by the president, to break the comet into bits that will fall into the ocean to be profitably harvested. The mission fails.

In a formidable cast, Rylance steals the show. The Rylance character is the CEO of BASH Cellular, a data-mining company that can read people’s thoughts and predict their futures.

Rylance was actually a late addition. At one point, DiCaprio was to play both the scientist and the billionaire, and the billionaire was a more conventional business thug. Rylance, soft-spoken and new-agey, has created a character who perfectly captures the creepy, messianic allure of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al., as well as their hypocrisy and willingness to sacrifice humanity.

As a Rylance obsessive, I have seen him, live, playing an astonishing range of roles from Richard III to a Minnesota ice fisherman, and this could be his most inventive and true creation of a character ever.

One of the movie’s many grace notes is the send-up of manic happy-news talk shows. Here, the co-hosts interview the scientists but want only an upbeat story. Even the good-guy scientist of the piece (DiCaprio) ends up corrupted, promoting the comet’s commercial potential and having a cheesy fling with the talk show co-host (Cate Blanchett), whose character is as cynical off camera as she is giddily upbeat on TV.

Those who have dismissed the movie as too much of a downer, or too obvious a parody of science denial, miss the point. Don’t Look Up is far richer as an excavation of the codependency of corporate and political fascism, enabled by the distraction of spectacle, social media, and tech.

The takeaway: If we are doomed, it is not mainly because of climate denial. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Categories Economy, Environment, Humor, Media

North Carolina: State Superintendent of Schools Derides “Critical Thinking”

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2022 //
100

Catherine Truitt, the Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina sneered at critical thinking, as she put forth her own definition of what education is for.

North Carolina teacher Stuart Egan wrote:

A Little Soma Made in 1984 Cooked At F451 Degrees For You? Why Every Teacher Should Be Insulted By State Superintendent Truitt’s Words

“Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.”

– FAHRENHEIT 451

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which [leaders] control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

– ALDOUS HUXLEY, AUTHOR OF BRAVE NEW WORLD

“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.”

– 1984

“We’ve got to redefine what the purpose of K-12 education is. Some would say it’s to produce critical thinkers. But my team and I believe that the purpose of a public K-12 education is to prepare students for post-secondary plans of their choice so that they can be a functioning member of the workforce.”

– STATE SUPERINTENDENT CATHERINE TRUITT, JANUARY 6TH, 2022

That last statement is a hell of a statement from the top ranking official for public education in the state – especially that part about free thinking.

In her short tenure as state super, Truitt has said many things to insult teachers, demean advocacy for public schools, and belittle the profession.

This is the most insulting – not just because as a teacher my job is to help students become critical thinkers, but as a parent of young lady who has graduated from public schools and a son about to enter high school, I don’t want the person who makes the biggest decisions about our schools to think of my children (and others’ children) as “functional members of the workforce.”

It’s almost like saying that our job as public school teachers is to create good workers for those who can profit from them.

Writing in “PoliticsNC,” Alexander H. Jones was incredulous. He wrote:

In my years of following state politics, I have heard North Carolina Republicans say stupid, outrageous, incomprehensible and otherwise foolish things. Pat McCrory said Caitlin Jenner would have to use the men’s shower if she ran track at UNC-Chapel Hill. Larry Pittman and others declared that the State of North Carolina has a right to nullify U.S. Supreme Court decisions within its borders. And so forth. But nothing I have heard echoing out of right-wing avenue was more utterly discrediting to a public servant than what DPI leader Catherine Truitt recently said about the purpose of K-12 education. Read on, if you can stomach it.

““We’ve got to redefine what the purpose of K-12 education is,” she declared. “Some would say it’s to produce critical thinkers. But my team and I believe that the purpose of a public K-12 education is to prepare students for the post-secondary plans of their choice so that they can be a functioning member of the workforce.” In one quick stroke, the leader of public education in North Carolina discounted and disparaged critical thinking, the foundation of an enlightened citizenry. In saying this she definitively sided with the forces of political authoritarianism and capitalist plunder, the two great foes of the American experiment that have always fought against liberal education.

Open the link and read the rest of his post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Economy, Education Industry, Ignorance, North Carolina

Good News About the Planet, for a Change

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2022 //
58

A friend directed me to a website that reports good news. We all need that during these stressful times.

Here are ten good news stories about the environment.

For example, there is this story.

“Researchers Pull Carbon Out of the Sky and ConvertIt to Instant Jet Fuel, Reshaping Aviation for Good.”

The story begins:

A simple, yet world-altering method of sucking CO2 from the air into airplanes where it is converted directly to jet fuel is described in a new paper published in Nature.

With the importance of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at the front and center of so many economic and policy decisions, the invention of an onboard system for carbon-neutral flight would represent a massive step towards addressing the climate crisis.

Some estimates puts the aviation industry’s primarily-CO2 footprint of global emissions at just under 1 billion metric tons, or around 2.4% of all human activities.

Converting atmospheric CO2 into useable hydrocarbon fuel is difficult, and as until recently, expensive both in terms of capital and electricity. Using a molecule that is fully oxidized and thermodynamically stable, there are few keys that can cheaply or efficiently ‘unlock it’ for reuse.

Some catalysts, compounds that can attract and force a change in molecules, can convert CO2 into hydrocarbon molecules of a desirable configuration for jet fuels, but their use is limited because they are expensive or require huge amounts of electricity. They’re also inconsistent with producing hydrocarbon chains with the number of atoms ideal for aviation fuels.

The University of Oxford’s Peter Edwards, Tiancun Xiao, Benzhen Yao, and colleagues designed a new iron-based catalyst that represents an inexpensive way of directly capturing atmospheric CO2 and converting it into a jet fuel-range of hydrocarbons.


Categories Economy, Environment

Boston Globe: Bad News on the Environment

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2022 //
47

The Boston Globe published a story about climate change that scared me. The story has the headline “Climate Change Has Destabilized the Earth’s Poles, Putting the Rest of the Planet in Peril.” President Biden has a sense of urgency about climate change, but thus far he has been unable to move the 50 Republicans and one Democrat (Manchin) to care about the future of the planet. Why is climate change a partisan issue? Don’t we all have a stake in the habitability of the earth? Don’t Republicans care about the world their children and grandchildren will inherit? I don’t get it.

The story begins:

The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big, so fast, scientists took to calling it “the dagger.”

“It was hugely surprising to see things changing that fast,” said Erin Pettit. The Oregon State University glaciologist had chosen this spot for her Antarctic field research precisely because of its stability. While other parts of the infamous Thwaites Glacier crumbled, this wedge of floating ice acted as a brace, slowing the melt. It was supposed to be boring, durable, safe.

Now climate change has turned the ice shelf into a threat — to Pettit’s field work, and to the world.

Planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels and other human activities has already raised global temperatures more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. But the effects are particularly profound at the poles, where rising temperatures have seriously undermined regions once locked in ice.

In research presented this week at the world’s biggest earth science conference, Pettit showed that the Thwaites ice shelf could collapse within the next three to five years, unleashing a river of ice that could dramatically raise sea levels. Aerial surveys document how warmer conditions have allowed beavers to invade the Arctic tundra, flooding the landscape with their dams. Large commercial ships are increasingly infiltrating formerly frozen areas, disturbing wildlife and generating disastrous amounts of trash. In many Alaska Native communities, climate impacts compounded the hardships of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to food shortages among people who have lived off this land for thousands of years.

“The very character of these places is changing,” said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and coeditor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual assessment of the state of the top of the world. “We are seeing conditions unlike those ever seen before.”

The rapid transformation of the Arctic and Antarctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift, and ecosystems will be altered. Unless humanity acts swiftly to curb emissions, scientists say, the same forces that have destabilized the poles will wreak havoc on the rest of the globe.

“The Arctic is a way to look into the future,” said Matthew Druckenmiller, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and another coeditor of the Arctic Report Card. “Small changes in temperature can have huge effects in a region that is dominated by ice.”

This year’s edition of the report card, which was presented at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting Tuesday, describes a landscape that is transforming so fast scientists struggle to keep up. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as the global average. The period between October and December 2020 was the warmest on record, scientists say.

Separately on Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed a new temperature record for the Arctic: 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on June 20, 2020.

Another story in the Boston Globe said that New England is warming faster than the world as a whole.

New England is warming significantly faster than global average temperatures, and that rate is expected to accelerate as more greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere and dangerous cycles of warming exacerbate climate change, according to a new study.

The authors of the scientific paper, which was published in the most recent edition of the journal Climate, analyzed temperature data over more than a century across the six New England states and documented how winters are becoming shorter and summers longer, jeopardizing much of the region’s unique ecology, economy, and cultural heritage.

Their findings were underscored this year in Greater Boston, which is on track to having the warmest year on record since 1900, according to data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Based on the data presented here, and the continuing increase of greenhouse gases, it is clear that humanity does not have its hand on the rudder of climate control,” the authors wrote. “We are in a climate crisis, and we need to take concerted steps to reduce our production of greenhouse gases as soon as possible. The temperature changes that are currently happening . . . threaten to disrupt the seasonality of New England, which will disrupt the ecosystems and the economy of New England….”

The warming in the region already has exceeded a threshold set by the Paris Climate Accord, in which nearly 200 nations agreed to cut their emissions in an effort to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. If global temperatures exceed that amount, the damage from intensifying storms, rising sea levels, droughts, forest fires, and other natural disasters is likely to be catastrophic, scientists say.

With New England’s annual temperatures expected to rise sharply in the coming decades, the authors of the study said the region should expect major disruptions to its economy, including coastal waters that will become increasingly inhospitable to iconic species such as cod and lobster; fewer days when skiing and other winter recreation will be possible; less maple syrup and other agricultural products produced; and a range of other consequences.

Categories Economics, Economy, Environment

Tom Ultican on THE PRIVATIZATION OF EVERYTHING

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2022 //
71

Tom Ultican has written extensively about the greed and politics behind privatization. In this post, he reviews an important new book about the dangers of privatization by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian. I urge you to buy the book.

Ultican writes:

Ronald Reagan claimed the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The new book, The Privatization of Everything, documents the widespread theft of the commons facilitated by Reagan’s anti-government philosophy. His remark echoed a claim from the “laissez-faire cheerleader” Friedrich Hayek that government has us all on the “road to serfdom” (Privatization 120). Sherrilyn Ifill, the former Director-Council of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund observed,

“What we’re seeing in our country today: the rhetoric, the hate, the ignorance, the coarseness, the vulgarity, the cruelty, the greed, the fear is the result of decades of poor citizenship development. It is a reflection of the fully privatized notion of citizenship, a feral conflict for the scraps left by oligarchs (Privatization 13).”

Libertarian politicians like former speaker of the house Paul Ryan and Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul claim Hayek and writer-philosopher Ayn Rand as their guiding lights. In a 2012 article, Politico reported, “…, to bring new staffers up to speed, Ryan gives them copies of Hayek’s classic “Road to Serfdom” and Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” — books he says inspires his political philosophy.” Politico also stated,

“But Hayek and Rand were violently opposed to each other’s ideas. It is virtually impossible to hold them in the same brain. When the termagant Rand met Hayek, she screamed across the room, ‘Compromiser!’ and reviled him as an ‘abysmal fool,’ an “ass” and a ‘totally, complete, vicious bastard.’”  (Termagant: a violent, turbulent, or brawling woman.)

Ayn Rand’s problem with Hayek was that he was not really the “laissez-faire cheerleader” he was purported to be. He certainly opposed many of the ideas emanating from Franklyn Roosevelt’s New Deal believing they would lead to worse problems than the ones being addressed. Fundamentally his thinking was shaped by a fear of communism. However, unlike today’s libertarians, he was not opposed to all government programs or interventions and that is what stirred Ayn Rand’s fury.

Robert Nielsen’s 2012 review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom observes,

“He also calls for social insurance in case of sickness and accident, as well as government assistance after a natural disaster. ‘But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and preservation of individual freedom.’ I think most advocates of Hayek have not read this passage and don’t realise he is not an extremist arguing against all forms of government. Let me repeat this, Hayek is arguing there is a good case for the government to get involved in healthcare, either in the form of universal healthcare or government insurance.”

John Maynard Keynes is thought of as the liberal economist whose theories guided President Roosevelt as he grappled with the great depression. Hayek’s and Keynes’s economic theories were in some ways polar opposites. However, Hayek came to London to work at the School of Economics where he and Keynes who was 16-years his senior became friends. They exchanged several letters concerning Hayek’s works in which Keynes found some agreement.

Chet Yarbrough’s audio book review of The Road to Serfdom states,

“Contrary to a wide perception that John Maynard Keynes (a liberal economist in today’s parlance) denigrated ‘The Road to Serfdom’; Keynes, in fact, praised it.”

“Though Keynes praised ‘The Road to Serfdom’, he did not think Hayek’s economic’ liberalism practical; i.e. Keynes infers that Hayek could not practically draw a line between a safety net for the poor, uninsured-sick, and unemployed (which Hayek endorsed) while denying government intervention in a competitive, laissez-faire economy.”

It is disingenuous to cite the theories of Friedrich Hayek as the justification for privatizing government functions and the commons.

The Privatization of Everything

The Privatization of Everything co-author Donald Cohen is the founder and executive director of In The Public Interest. Co-author Allen Mikaelian is the bestselling author of Metal of Honor and a doctoral fellow in history at American University. Besides the authors’ individual work, the team at In The Public Interest contributed significantly to the book with research and documentation.

Of their intention in writing the book, the authors state,

“Our approach is both idealistic and practical. We want readers to see the lofty values and big ideas behind the creation of public goods, and we want readers to feel empowered to question those values and introduce new ones. We want to help change the conversation, so we can stop talking about ‘government monopolies’ and return to talking about public control over public goods (Privatization 19).

They detail several cases showing the downside of the government being forced to give control over to private business. In this era of human-activity-induced climate change, what has been happening at the National Weather Service (NWS) is instructive.

In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy believed that the US and the Soviet Union could find a field of cooperation in supporting the World Meteorological Organization. As a result, 193 countries and territories all agreed to provide “essential data” on a “free and unrestricted basis.” “Each day, global observations add up to twenty terabytes of data, which is processed by a supercomputer running 77 trillion calculations per second (Privatization 267).”

The book notes, “In the 1990s, at about the same time that forecasting got consistently good, private interests and free-market absolutists started insisting that the NWS and related agencies were ‘competing’ with private enterprise.” Barry Myers, head of AccuWeather was loudly accusing the government of running a “monopoly.” He went to the extreme of calling for the government to get out of the weather predicting business which made no sense since AccuWeather is completely dependent on NWS predictions. (Privatization 268)

After a killer tornado in 2011, NWS employees proposed a smart-phone app to better inform the public. The author’s report, “… this ultimately took a backseat to Myers’s insistence that his AccuWeather apps shouldn’t face ‘unfair’ competition (Privatization 270).” To this day, NWS has no smartphone app.

Weather forecasts are pretty good for up to a week but after that as time passes they become more and more useless. The models for predicting the weather are highly dependent on the preceding day and the farther you get from accurate data for that day the more error invades the predictions. NWS restricts its predictions to a one-week time-frame but AccuWeather and the Weather Channel in order to attract customers provide meaningless 2-week up to 90-days predictions. (Privatization 272)

Extreme weather events are life threatening. The authors state,

“The NWS’s mission includes saving lives. The business model of corporations like AccuWeather includes saving lives of paying customers only (Privatization 273).”

There are many episodes like NWS detailed. In the section on private prisons, we read about such atrocities as the Idaho correctional facility known as the “Gladiator School” (Privatization 140). When detailing the privatization of water we are informed of Nestles CEO, Peter Brabeck stating how extreme it was to believe that “as a human being you should have a right to water (Privatization 54).”

Privatizing Public Education Stabs Democracy in the Heart

The First Public School in America

Boston Latin School was founded April 23, 1635. America’s first public school only accepted boys for their curriculum centered on humanities including the study of Latin and Greek. Its more famous revolutionary-era students were Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin. These revolutionary thinkers who gave America democracy were educated in a public school and would latter agree that free public schools were necessary to a functioning democracy.

When Betsy DeVos was calling for vouchers and charter schools, she was implicitly demanding public dollars support religious schools that would not accept transgender students or homosexual teachers. She wanted schools free to teach a doctrine of science denial and religious bigotry. “Freedom of choice in this case meant the freedom to discriminate, with the blessing of public funds (Privatization 210).”

One of the several disturbing stories about the menace of privatizing schools comes from Reynolds Lake Oconee, Georgia. Wealthy real estate developer Mercer Reynolds III made a charter school the center of his community development. The charter school application called for 80% of the children to come from Reynolds properties. The other 12% would go to students in nearby wealthy white communities and the remaining 8% would go to countywide residents. (Privatization 211-212)

With a mix of taxpayer and private funding, Reynolds built an impressive school. It had a piano lab with 25 pianos, a pond and offered 17 AP classes. The school is 73% white. The nearby public school that is 68% black and would never dream of a piano lab has seen the Reynolds school continually siphon off more of their students. They have been forced into laying-off staff and tightening budgets. (Privatization 212)

Cohen and Mikaelian concluded,

“This was a clear-cut case of rich whites diverting money from struggling black families in order to further push them to the margins. And they used the ideas of school choice and free market to justify it.

As the book makes clear, every time a public good is privatized the public loses some of their democratic rights over that lost good. This is a powerful book that everyone should read. In the last chapter the authors call out to us,

“We can’t let private interests sell us public goods as consumers, because the free market can’t avoid creating exclusions. School choice quickly devolves into segregation. Public parks and highways are divided into general versus premium services. In the midst of a notional health crisis, ventilators go to the highest bidder.”

Categories Democracy, Deregulation, Economy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization
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